Page 61 of Omega's Flight
C H A P T E R 4 4
I watched with interest as Cas spread out his papers in front of us. Interest, and a growing collection of butterflies in my stomach. Roland giving up on me was not entirely unexpected, though it had been a slap in the face to see how little value they placed on my labor in caring for my mate and my pups. Oddly, I'd felt nothing at Roland's admission that I, as a person, had no worth. It wasn't exactly a surprise what the non-omegas thought of me personally.
"Good afternoon, Alpha Jackson-Jellystone," Cas began, his voice exquisitely polite.
"Casimir, isn't it?" Roland said. "You're the youngest, right?"
Casimir? In other circumstances, I might have giggled but I'd noticed even just over the past couple of days of working together that Cas's shoulders pulled up when he was annoyed, and they'd just done that. But Casimir, though. Where did a name like that come from?
My attention snapped back to the alpha beside me when he said, "Yes. Most people call me Cas, the other is a mouthful."
Roland chuckled. "It is that. So, you're in charge of negotiating for the pups."
"I am," Cas said calmly. "But I'm going to advise you of some facts of which you may not be aware at the moment and I would ask that you consider them carefully before making any decisions in this situation."
"I'm not sure there's much to say, but I did tell your brother I'd listen to you, so we might as well get it over with."
I flinched at the dismissive tone, but Cas only made a face and tossed me a glance filled with frustration and amusement. "All right. The first piece of information that you should be aware of, and which was responsible for the delay in having this conversation, is that Raleigh was carrying a pup at the time he decided that he needed to leave Degan."
"But he isn't now," Roland stated. "So he got rid of it?"
Cas's shoulders rose another fraction of an inch. "No, the little boy was lost, but not intentionally. We nearly lost Raleigh as well."
"He should have stayed here, all that junketing around probably started it. Really, does that not prove to you that he's unfit to care for pups without someone to watch him?"
I leaned forward to stop whatever it was that Cas was about to say. He turned eyes as dark as midnight on me and I put my hand over his mouth, shaking my head at him. Whatever fury it was that he wanted to unleash on Roland would do neither of us any good. I needed the lawyer here, not the alpha. Roland didn't see Cas as his equal—we had to outsmart him. I held his gaze until I saw the anger recede and was startled to realize that it wasn't the wild part of him that was so angry, but the civilized one. Then the wolfish part of him rose to the surface and the lawyer began to speak.
"I wasn't aware that a beating serious enough to cause a miscarriage was Jackson-Jellystone's manner of controlling the population now. Was there a study done?" His voice was innocently curious, with a slap of derision in it.
"What beating? I don't know what you're talking about."
"Only that the loss of the pup was triggered by Degan's violent physical attack on his mate, with no respect for Raleigh's status or for the pup."
"I'm sure he didn't know—" Roland protested, but even I could hear the shock in his words.
"He'd known nearly a week," Cas said flatly. "I suppose he could have forgotten in the interim." The words hung in the air, patently ridiculous.
"I know you don't see it that way in Mercy Hills," Roland began slowly. "But an alpha has the right to discipline his omega in cases where the omega is being disobedient or ignoring his responsibilities. They’re not like the rest of us, you should know that given how many you have over there now."
"I saw the bruises," Cas said in a deceptively soft voice. I wondered if Roland could hear the threat in it through the phone. "That wasn't discipline, it was rage. An alpha needs to control that part of him if he wants to call himself one."
"Don't be telling me my job, boy. I know how to hunt."
"Omegas only, or do you hunt deltas too?" Cas reached down beside him into a bag I hadn't noticed until then and pulled out a laptop. "Raleigh, please describe that night for Alpha Jackson-Jellystone." He opened the computer and pushed the power button.
He'd warned me it was likely that I'd have to relive that night for the Alpha, that the pictures Holland had taken during that first awful night of my bruises might have to see the light of day in Jackson-Jellystone. I'd assured him that if it made it possible for my pups to stay in Mercy Hills I'd do anything, but my stomach still twisted with anxiety.
Cas put a hand on mine and pressed it lightly in support. You can do this, he mouthed at me.
So, rather than disappoint him, I began to tell the story of the night that had killed at least my mating, if not my pup. And I stuck just to the facts of that night, as Cas had advised. If Roland wanted to talk to Adelaide about the condition of the pup, he was welcome to call her. But we were under no obligation to “tell him something he could find out for himself with one phone call,” Cas had explained with a startling ferocity.
He was an alpha, and alphas dealt with loss through their anger. Though at the time I couldn’t figure out why he would be so angry on my behalf.
Cas was a gift sent from the Moonlands to help me that day. He described himself as a bureaucrat, a paper-pusher who spent more time at a desk talking to numbers than to people, but during that interview, he was like a warrior out of the old tales. Like the Lord Lysoonka himself come to stand as a shield between me and my pups and the pack that wanted to take them from me. Every time Roland tried to put a slant on my words, put responsibility on me for Degan's behavior, Cas stopped him cold and backed him up, forcing agreement out of the Alpha the way a pack forced a deer onto the killing ground, with guile and speed and movements so quick that the deer had nowhere else to go but where the pack willed. And the longer this went on, the braver I grew.
I thought revealing those pictures would be more difficult than it was, but in the end it didn't give me more than a moment's apprehension when Cas sent that email to Roland. I guessed there was some deeper reason for it aside from the evidence of the blows, because he snarled silently as he attached the files to the email, and my blooming bravery made me reach out and tentatively touch his arm, offering what comfort I could for something I didn't understand.
And all through this, I spoke about what my life had become and began to talk about other incidents, things that I hadn't even recognized as abuse. Each word lifted a stone from my heart that I hadn't realized had been weighing me down, until I thought I might be able to walk out of this building and fly.
